Opening Ourselves To Non Monogamy After 20 Years of Marriage
Our reasons weren’t the same but we both wanted sex with other people
My husband and I are clear on one thing: The decision to open up our marriage was mutual. We were in complete agreement to give each other the freedom to have sex with other people. But the reasons for why we wanted to be non monogamous were very different. And little did we know that the why was super important, and that the reasons we gave at first were very different than the ones we gave a little later.
At the beginning, my husband was onboard to becoming non monogamous because he wanted more sex. That’s all he wanted: more of it. Didn’t matter with who. He said that had I been willing to have sex with him as often as he wanted sex, that he would have been just as happy to have sex with me as another woman.
And I’m sure now you’re reading this and thinking:
“Well, how much sex were they having before they opened up? And how much sex did he actually want?”
OK, fine, in the spirit of opening up, I’ll tell you. By the time we decided to open up our marriage we had been together for over 20 years. And I would say sex happened on a regular but not overly frequent basis. I considered the frequency of our sexual activities to be normal after 20+ years, full-time jobs and 3 kids in the mix. So, uhm, if you want specifics, I’d say we were on average having sex once or twice times a month. (Is your curiosity satisfied now?)
My husband on the other hand would give you a slightly different answer. He would probably agree that we were having sex on average once a month (I don’t think he’d agree to the twice a month estimate I gave). But he would definitely say that in his mind this was not normal. He thought that 20+ years of marriage, full-time jobs and 3 kids in the mix should still result in us having sex much more frequently than that. His ideal frequency would have been closer to 2 or 3 times a week. So we were definitely at odds in what we considered normal frequency. This is why he was interested in beefing up those numbers with someone else.
My reasons for wanting to be non monogamous were different. I was not motivated to open up our relationship to have more sex per se. My motivation was to have sex with more men. I had always felt a little under-experienced in my sexual life. Throughout my adult life, the few friends I have told about how many men I have slept with (only one, my husband) have appeared surprised. And, yes, maybe it was how I interpreted their silence, questions or discomfort. But I couldn’t help but feel they felt a bit sorry for me.
And I did feel sorry for myself. Because I knew that I had missed out on a life experience. I’d missed out on the proverbial “sowing my oats” when I was young. The chance of experiencing a range of sexual encounters, of seeing how much penises vary, of being pushed out of my comfort zone to try something new. And I really wanted those experiences. I kept thinking to myself life is short. And at the age of 42 it was really starting to look shorter…
On a more fundamental level I was also really struggling with monogamy as a rule that I had to live by. I felt it was so unfair that of all the experiences we can have in life — jobs, travel, kids, friends which are certainly not capped at one– that having sex with more than one man after marriage was so definitively forbidden. Like, why? I kept asking myself the question. Why does our society tie so closely the commitment of marriage with monogamy?
For me, this just didn’t feel right. And so that — a bit of a rebellion against being told what I could and could not do in my life — and wanting to experience different men was why I wanted to be non monogamous.
It later became clear to us that our reasons for becoming non monogamous were actually much deeper. We were both looking for something that we weren’t even aware of at the time. It was, as it turned out, not just about having more frequent sex for my husband. It was about feeling wanted and needed. And for me, it wasn’t in fact just to be unconventional or to see more penises. It was to have a private life — a me that I had never before been able to express– to have autonomy and to feel a sexual intensity I thought I couldn’t feel.
There’s so much in that last paragraph. It wasn’t easy to write, just as it didn’t come easy to figure all that out. That paragraph reflects a lot of growth. It is one of the reasons that opening up our relationship, as hard as it has been for us, has been a positive experience. Because we’ve grown. How’s that for a good reason to change things up?
